What happens to a profitable local business when the its cost of a cheap foreign raw material goes up? Sourcing locally might not be the answer, especially if the cost of a local acquisition goes up to be just below china+tariff.
I went back to Devuan and sysvinit for a peace of mind. Systemd works until it does not.
The final straw for me were randomly missing NFS mounts after booting to multiuser.
I was not able to find the fix, and the good folks on debian forums, while acknowledging the problem, could not help either.
From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time.
I disagree with you.
You like this rule being broken? Great, good for you.
What about the other rules? The ones protecting you and the country? Is due process not valuable any more? What protects us from people with bad or selfish intentions?
Yeah, kids starving and dying of cholera.. fuck em /s
> The Inspector General also warned that $489 million in humanitarian food aid was at risk of spoiling due to staff furloughs and unclear guidance. The Office of Presidential Personnel fired the Inspector General the next day, despite a law requiring 30 days notice to Congress before firing an Inspector General.
The correct way for the government to reel in USAID would be for congress to give them less funding and to tell them specifically what they want funded. Regardless if it offends you personally, those are all lawful uses of the money and the only illegal thing that's happened here is the funding being stopped by the President.
First, I would not trust the current USAID disbursement personnel not to piss the money into the wind. I want them gone.
And it's not a question of being offended personally - these are just ridiculous expenses that cannot possibly be justified. But I am indeed offended that the amount 4x of my real estate taxes that I can barely scrape off the bottom of a barrel is being wasted on some opera abroad. If you are wondering why people vote for Trump, this is one of those reasons.
Regarding legality of funding being stopped by the President, I am not a lawyer (and I am guessing neither are you), so I am not going to take your legal opinion on this and will wait for the courts to issue the final ruling.
That they are senseless enough to their their personal opinions on budgeting should run the entire government, and that their little agendas are the reason everything should burn to the ground? Yes, that is why people voted for trump (they are stupid and vindictive).
You can't berate or threaten people into thinking your voting or political opinions are smart/well founded. It either is or it isn't.
Watching Trump illegally destroy institutions that collectively use <5% of the federal budget, while increasing the defect, and rationalizing it as "At least Trump is trying to do something about the runaway government spending" is stupid. Straight up stupid.
The fact that there’s a specific law called the Impoundment Control Act where the specific actions Trump is trying were made illegal should give you a hint to which way the court cases are going to go..
Why are you confident the Supreme Court will not declare the Impoundment Control Act an unconstitutional restriction of executive power? Or declare the only recourse is impeachment? Who do you expect would enforce the ruling you predicted?
That is surely the elephant in the room.. every time it’s been litigated before the court in the past, the Act has been found constitutional but who knows with this specific set of justices and their obsequiousness to Trump and his executive branch.
Those numbers are for the wrong line items, and the WH press secretary was wrong about the source of those funds. Both of those were out of the state department budget, which (putting aside the present murky status) did not oversee USAID at the time.
What can I say... if you are correct about this (there are a lot of claims from both sides but no proofs), I hope DOGE gets its hands on the State Department, too. We have enough worthy causes to take care of inside the US.
It went up considerably because of nordic exports to the rest of Europe. They are producing enough for themselves, but not if they have to share.
It's the same reason why US gas prices are somewhat on the high side lately - a lot of it is exported to Europe, and the price differential is large enough to make this worth the trouble.
Seems your average semiconductor foundry needs around 100MW[1] to 200MW[2] of electrical power to operate. The main consumption is down to refrigeration chillers[3].
Average US house uses about 12600kWh per year[4], or 1.44kW average across a year. So that means one foundry takes about what 70k to 140k houses would take.
For any energy intensive industry there is always the option to build new wind and solar for relatively cheap. But labor is cheaper and less regulated in the US and we make it easy to hire skilled immigrants. Having a pro-coal president probably doesn't hurt (but having an anti-wind president might).
I think the bigger reasons are the security and trade issues. The US has embraced protectionism and is withdrawing from security obligations, yet Taiwan requires both US trade and US security guarantees to survive. Unlike with Ukraine, no other powers look capable of filling those roles if Trump keeps pursuing his America First agenda.
You realize that the US buys energy from Canada right? The US has no advantage on energy. Even in Europe, building more power capacity is simply a matter of wanting to.
Right. I do. The US buys a lot of it, and it is cheap.
As for Europe, you are right, partially it's a matter of a mindset, however there are objective reasons for expensive energy. France's access to cheap uranium is almost gone. Europe refuses to sign long-term russian gas delivery contracts and are buying spot which costs arm and leg (whatever is left of it). German power plants are shuttered. LNG imported from the US is very expensive.
Some German CEOs (I think Volkswagen if I recall correctly) said recently that Germany offers no competitive advantage these days. I agree.
Where do you think manufacturing will go? Energy is everything.
However hard it is, the decline of the US is going to force Europe and the rest of the western countries to build out replacements for US labour and goods. The US is simply not a reliable trading partner nor ally under the new administration. Energy will be built.
Its weird to claim that the US is in decline when discussing the EU. The fate of the EU is incredibly intertwined with that of the US. If one is in decline, the other is as well.
The fall of the US will absolutely harm other western countries yes. But we will build and eventually thrive, unlike the US if it remains on its current trajectory.
I'm sorry but that's such an odd statement. One of the reasons people are saying that the US is currently falling or something is because they aren't as keen on defending Europe as they once were. The point is that Europe cannot even realistically defend itself.
Euro nationalism is so weird to me. I can't think of any metric where the US is doing worst (a part from healthcare and other social issues but those have always been worse in the US). Like in what way do you think that Europe is somehow stronger than the US? By the way this is coming from someone who isn't american, it's just weird that you actually think that Europe's trajectory is somehow towards a thriving future but the US is on its way to fail.
I remember the same doom and gloom and boasting from Europeans back in 2016, but it turns out that even with Trump Europe still didn't manage to outpace economically the US by 2020, or 2024. In fact the gap has widened.
The US and European alliance was a marriage of convenience. One of the results of Ukrainian conflict was manufacturing moving from Europe to the US.
Energy has to be built from something, and Europe does not have it.
Europe has sun and wind. In the time it would take the US to build one nuclear plant Europe can build over 10x as much renewable capacity, for 1/10th the cost. As much as I'm pro environmental protection, the reality is that a lot of places are preferring renewables because they are cheaper and faster to build than traditional power plants for the same energy outputs. Even Texas is building tons of renewables for this reason.
So yes, energy will be built in Europe and elsewhere.
Here's the real time state of Finland's power grid. Zoom out to the month view. Solar is pitiful this time of the year, and wind is horribly inconsistent. Some days the wind doesn't blow at all and the fossil fuel "co-generation" plants need to be spun up. You can't just ignore the demand for reliable, base load power.
One word: BS. Germany energy shortages were in the news early this year, and last year, and the year before then. See this, for example: https://www.power-technology.com/news/germany-wind-power-sho... Germany and its renewables is just a laughing stock at this point. One cannot run an industry on renewables, and they are finding this out. There was already some talk about restarting nuclear power plants.
With your optimism, they would have tackled this problem already.
Texas already paid its price for their lack of investment in traditional generation facilities.
What do you think it can be blockaded with? Submarines... barely. Carriers are sitting ducks these days, especially since China already has an equivalent of Russian Onix missiles and launch platforms. Subs won't cover the land corridor, and they will get all they need across the Russian border if it comes to that.
China will eventually get Taiwan without firing a shot. Pretending that the US can defend an island next to a Chinese border is a pipe dream.
The Taiwan Strait is around 180 KM long, UK to France is around 30 to 40 KM in comparison. That same strait is also not safe to traverse except for two periods each year, so if they are going to invade we will know beforehand.
China needs to win this quickly, because any sort of kinetic war is going to put freeze the global economy and likely cause a mass recession, while the USA (& India) can blockade China's supply and oil chains from the Middle East beyond their force projection. Russian-Chinese infrastructure in Siberia isn't well developed and could also easily destroyed with strategic weapons from Alaska. Not to mention the sheer logistics of sending and maintaining millions of men across the strait. One missile and those troops sink into the ocean.
Trying to do a blockade on Taiwan premature isn't a good idea either, because it's conversely giving the USA the first move to organize it's forces out of harm's way, and basically turns a signficant chunk of the PLAN into sitting ducks out at the sea. Most Chinese victories are predicated on the China quickly wiping out US assets in Japan, Korea and Guam, if they don't manage to do that and fail to achieve air superiority, their troop carriers are going to sitting ducks for drones and fighters in the air.
You are missing one thing: any weapons flying into China will result in stuff exploding in New York and Washington. US carriers will be sunk, and there is no appetite in the US for either scenario.
Anyway, the whole thing won't require a single shot. The island and the mainland have close economic ties; people that determine taiwanese policy are heavily invested in China. All the tough words that are being said are for public consumption.
A regional conflict over Taiwan is highly unlikely to result in ICBMs headed for NYC and DC, because China knows that’s effectively the end of modern China. And sinking carriers would also be a very risky escalation given the ability of the US and other allies to retaliate.
I do think you’re right that Taiwan will ultimately lose without much warfare, because Trump is a world-class coward and rolls over for every autocrat who looks in his direction.
If carriers are being used to help support Taiwan in this hypothetical, they are obviously fair game and sinking them isn’t escalatory, right? We don’t get to go to war and declare the troops fighting the war off limits to retaliation.
If that was how it worked, why wouldn’t China declare all their transport boats sacrosanct?
If we think our retaliation to getting a carrier sunk would be to end the world, we should probably not use them.
Strikes by the US inside China are highly unlikely for the same reason.
As for Trump, he is simply pragmatic. Taiwan is indefensible from the military standpoint. I would not count on allies too much, because Europe's remaining 1 1/2 soldiers cannot make any difference, and the UK can barely get its ships out of the harbor.
Anyway, all of this is just a show.
Strikes by the US on Chinese military facilities are vastly more likely than ICBM strikes against civilian population centers on the other side of the world, for obvious reasons.
Then you proceed to write that China can't sink US carriers that are there to destroy Chinese ships and kill Chinese people. Next, you say that the US bombing China would not cause ICBM nuclear warheads on US cities.
So how does war work? Only one side gets to fight?
It’s revealing that you can’t differentiate between hitting military assets actively engaged in a conflict, and hitting civilian population centers on the other side of the world.
Yep. The side that sits at the keyboard of a basement computer shooting at zombies.
Here is my suggestion to people who want the US to play part in Taiwan/China affair: they should take their broomsticks and volunteer. And that includes the war in Ukraine, too.
I work, and the fact that my tax money is going into a black hole makes my blood boil. God bless Musk and DOGE for what they do.
Here is just one headline from today,
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.
Will you go on the record and say that $4.7T in a year is fraudulent or misspent? I want to be crystal clear with what you're insinuating, because that's a massive amount of money, easily the biggest fraud of all time by a factor of almost 30.
I don't understand what this means though, almost all of our money passes an audit which necessarily has a paper trail. The few agencies which don't usually have very idiosyncratic audit misses which are, in any event, overseen by inspectors general (or were until trump fired all of them) which have been very zealous to jump on this.
so then misspent? Must be, because if it's not misspent than impossible to trace is a little irrelevant. It can't be unaudited, because every department passes an audit every year (except the DoD, but they basically pass an audit and the reasons they currently don't are mostly technical)
Can you not find it? I can find basically any spending data I want at the tip of my fingers (well, less so now that it's unclear what's being paid) - anything specific that you feel is missing that you want to see?
> Here is just one headline from today, The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.
And you believe them?
This is a department that fired multiple different nuclear weapons inspector and maintenance teams without knowing what their job was.
Had to re-hire them. They weren't redundant teams. DOGE just didn't understand what they (or the teams) were doing.
Now, I'm very happy for the US nuclear stockpile to shrink. I sure think you have too many of them. But then, I'm foreign and a hippy, so I would. But (1) do you?, and (2) do you want it to shrink by some of them accidentally exploding? Or being relocated by a hostile power taking advantage of the inspectors all being on early retirement?
I am not jumping to conclusions and will reserve the judgement for later. They provided no proof so far, but hopefully it will be forthcoming, and I would not dismiss their claim outright.
As I'm asking you if you want this done, take your pick.
Loss of oversight made a bunch of USSR suitcase nukes, ~100 or so, go walkabout when they collapsed. Russia denies this, of course. They might be fine, or not, nobody (in public) really knows. Probably not a huge risk without maintenance, if you nick it but don't know what it is you might scrap it for parts and mistake the core for tungsten or lead, but… not great, unless it was existing nuclear powers who took them.
They deny that, but of course you know for sure that they are lying, that the nukes went missing, and you have the proof. Just like I know for a fact that there are alien craft hidden in Area 51.
It was a statement made by General Aleksandr Lebed, former Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, in a meeting with an American congressional delegation.
Perhaps he was drunk, or lying, or just plain unable to find the people who knew which cupboard the devices were safely locked in. But he did make those claims. And you are missing the wood for the trees.
This "wood" (and the US report) consists of exactly one person who made this claim, and a member of corrupt Yeltsin's entourage to boot. I'd say if these nukes were real, they would have exploded somewhere by now.
Try harder.
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